A news story on Malaysian news website malaysiakini.com quotes climatologist and oceanographer Professor Dr Fredolin Tangang of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, the National University of Malaysia, as saying that this year’s El Niño was even more extreme than the severe phenomena experienced in 1982/82 and 1997/98 but that there is “no conclusive evidence that the occurrence of El Nino (frequency and intensity) is influenced by climate change”.

Tangang served from 2008 to 2015 as vice-chairperson of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations climate science agency.

Tangang stated that the IPCC, in its latest report released in 2013, did not come up with a conclusion on the inter-relation between El Niño and global warming. He said that unlike typhoons, which the IPCC concluded would increase in intensity as global warming intensified, El Niño occurrences did not switch in frequency or intensity due to climate change.

“El Niño is a naturally occurring phenomenon, which is part of the inter-annual variability associated with oscillation of the atmosphere-ocean interaction in the Pacific Ocean that occurs in a two- to seven-year cycle,” he explained.